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from the Sizzlin' Deals thread about the Samsung 840 drives that were on sale recently...got my 250GB version today. packaging is very well done (reminded me of an Apple product regarding the style, if that means anything) and the drive itself looks great.

so this is still an older laptop (retired business laptop), so it only has SATA2 and not SATA3.

older Intel 160GB series 320 SSD:

seq read: 276MB/s
seq write: 161MB/s
random read IOPS: 34,328/s
random write IOPS: 15,772/s

new Samsung 840:

seq read: 280MB/s
seq write: 256MB/s
random read IOPS: 42,399/s
random write IOPS: 38,491/s

SATA2 is definitely holding the reads back (it's rated for 500+). still a nice overall boost.

the upgrade kit the drive came with was a very nice touch. i used the included software to migrate the data, along with the included usb-to-sata adapter. this laptop is USB2.0 only, so it took a bit to migrate, but went without a hitch.

the Samsung software is very nice...the best included software i've used so far for a drive. the "Samsung Magician" does performance testing, firmware updates, and performance tweaking. slick interface and very modern looking. the migration software was as easy as it can get too...nice graphical interface, no frills...just run it, select what partitions you want to migrate and it lets you resize them as needed. done.

as long as the drive doesn't fail, i'm extremely pleased so far.

9.9/10

Ya, as you mentioned, having SATA2 really holds you back. Even so, the performance is still way more than you would get a with a standard drive. In case of my laptop, it supports two hard drives, so I have one SSD and a large storage drive for data.

But I think what makes the difference is all the extras it includes to make the process as simple as possible.